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   Vol.65/No.19            May 14, 2001 
 
 
25 and 50 Years Ago

May 14, 1976

WASHINGTON--Prompted by the NAACP's support for Black rights in the navy, the FBI began a spying operation on the civil rights group in 1941 that the government admits continued for twenty-five years.

These details--the first proof that the NAACP had been a target of government harassment--were made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its final domestic report April 28.

The report outlined a concerted government campaign to disrupt the Black movement in this country. No group was "moderate" enough to escape the FBI's devious operations over the years; it infiltrated and tried to disrupt groups ranging from the National Urban League and every Black student union in the country to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party.

"A great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black," the report quotes an FBI official, were included in the bureau's Black Nationalist-Hate Groups Cointelpro operation begun in 1967.

The committee report also summarized operations against numerous other groups, including the Socialist Workers Party, the Business Executive Move for Peace, National Organization for Women, and the Communist Party. FBI headquarters alone has 500,000 domestic intelligence files, the document reported.

May 14, 1951

On May Day, the colonial revolution, dominant feature of the present world situation, came to Paris, when thousands of Algerian workers successfully chased away 500 policemen who tried to break up their demonstration and to tear their national banner out of their hands.

Last year the participation of some 25,000 Algerian workers, members of the militant nationalist MTLD (Mouvement por le Triomphe des Libertes Democratiques, present name for the outlawed Algerian People's Party) was the dominant note of an otherwise lukewarm May 1 parade. The police, enraged by the wonderful, militant demonstration by the Algerian workers, the most disinherited and downtrodden layer of the French working class, had planned long in advance to prevent the Algerians form repeating the same feat this year. The heightened repression of the Algerian national movement is symbolized by the fact that the new governor-general of Algeria is Leonard, the former chief of Paris police.

No month passes without a frame-up trial of MTLD leaders in Algeria or without brutal arrest and torture of MTLD militants. In France, whither several hundred thousand Algerian workers have been lured by promises of work and better living conditions, the biggest centers of concentration of North African population (Paris, Marseilles and the industrial area of the North and Northeast) are constantly scenes of police violence and organized raids against these pariahs.

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